72 and that many inhabitants had fallen sick About an hour from Baghdad, as we neared Karbala, it seemed an ominous sign that groves of palm trees had been uprooted and were lying on the ground. Our minder told us that the Iraqi Army had destroyed them, to deny hiding places to rebel bands. Having seen how the cities of the north had been spared by civil war, and how few scars the allied bombing had left on Baghdad, I was shocked by what I saw in the south. The devastation here was in fact compa- rable to the levelling of cities in the Second World War, and the damage to the shrines was more serious than that which had been done to many European cathedrals. What is more, a sharp edge of tension persisted in the south, as if no one could be sure that the fighting would not start up again. A manned tank, its national flag flying and its gun covering the road, greeted our car when we entered Karbala. As we approached the center of the city, I saw pedestrians negoti- ating their paths amid piles of rubble. It seemed that no neighborhood had been spared. Big holes in walls indi- cated tank fire; smaller holes, and chunks taken out of concrete, were the signature of lighter, automatic weap- ons. The wreckage suggested block- by-block, if not house-by- house, resis- tance, and many casualties. Then I saw, in silhouette, the Shrine of Abbas, and at a distance it was as resplendent as I had remembered it. The shrine occupies the equivalent of two or three city blocks, so its size is awesome in itself, and above the wall that surrounds it soar twin gold-leafed domes and slim, piercing minarets. But in a few moments I saw tanks at its gates, and the closer I came to the shrine the more horribly defaced I realized it to be. Huge gashes had been made in the walls, and the heavy wooden doors had been blown apart. Swirls of Arabic graffiti had been painted on every surface and then painted over. "Long Live the Republican Guard," an outer coat said, but still visible was a message underneath say- ing "Down with Saddam CriminaL" The arches leading into the courtyard had been badly hit. An officer invited us inside and, in what had been a library for the clergy of the mosque, showed us instruments of torture, which he claimed had been left behind by the rebels, and even a noose, with which he said Baath Party officials had been hanged. The large courtyard, where I remembered families picnicking dur- ing an earlier visit, now served as a parade ground and barracks for an Army unit standing guard. As we left the shrine to return to the car, soldiers carrying weapons slung over their shoulders looked down on us from the top of the wall. One of them signalled to me with a thumbs-up gesture, a message of triumph. The Shrine of Hussein, which stands about a hundred yards from the Shrine of Abbas, was in even worse condition. The souk and the plaza that lay be- tween them had been reduced to dust. Handsome old houses with overhang- ing balconies called shanashils had been destroyed. Fifty-millimetre machine- gun shells littered the ground. I saw several men sifting through a mound of debris, and asked what they were doing; one replied, good-naturedly, that the rubble was all that was left of his jewelry shop, and he was trying to recover lost gold. The wall surround- ing the Shrine of Hussein looked as if it had been struck by an earthquake. The colorful mosaic tiles, the granite facing, and the ceramic grilles that covered the windows were scattered all over the pavement. The dome, leafed in gold at great cost during the Iran- Iraq War as an offering from Saddam Hussein to the Shiites, had been punc- tured by cannon fire. Through breaches in the wall we could see Iraqi flags flying inside, but an officer standing at the gate would not let us enter. He told us that the destruction had been the result of a three-day battle to dislodge rebel forces from the shrine. Both sides, it seemed, were trying to make a political asset of the devastation: the government blamed the rebels for making a fortress of the shrine, and the rebels blamed the Army for the gunfire that had ultimately subdued them. Barely out of Karbala and heading St(tA L JUNE 24, 1991 farther south, we were stopped at a roadblock and informed by a young police officer that we would not be permitted to go on to Najaf, which was an hour away. We argued with him to no avail, and when we tried to get our minder to cite the authority of the Ministry of Information he declined, saying, "I'm an Iraqi. Sometimes the police say yes, sometimes they say no. There is nothing we can do about it." But we did persuade the minder to take us to the office of Karbala's gov- ernor, where we hoped for an inter- view and, perhaps, an appeal on the N ajaf visit. To our surprise, we were ushered immediately into the governor's office- a dark and gloomy room with a tele- vision set and, on the walls, no fewer than five portraits of Saddam. The governor, a tall, bald man wearing an olive-drab uniform with the insignia of a general of the police, introduced himself as Khalid Abdul Aziz Sayeed. Though he had been a Baath Party member for thirty-five years, there was something engagingly open about him, and he struck me as a more honest spokesman than, say, Sirwan Abd Allah J af, in Irbil. Sayeed told us that on March 1st, with the Army engaged in Kuwait, a force of Shiite fundamental- ists under Iranian leadership had raided the headquarters of the Karbala police and stolen all its arms. Within a few days, defecting Army units had swelled this force, until the rebels-whom he referred to as "criminals" -reached a strength of about fifty thousand. But, he said, the force was weakened by the absence of a centralized command and of strategic plans. Though some of the rebels fled when the Army arrived from Kuwait, most of them, he said with grudging admiration, put up a tenacious defense. About three thou- sand rebels, along with some civilian followers, retreated into the two shrines, thinking that the Army would not dare attack them there, and at first the Army did attempt to dislodge them by siege. But then, reluctantly, the Army turned to its heavy guns, and their fire ended the resistance quickly. About six hun- dred people were killed in the fighting, Sayeed said, most of them civilians- a figure that, given the condition of the city, seemed to me a low estimate. He also said that three thousand rebels had been captured, including sixty Ira- nians. When Sayeed finished his ac- count, we thanked him and asked for